Indiscriminate contemplations

OS

Debian stable just jumped from the previous etch 4 to the new lenny 5. For those looking for an easy upgrade path, there actually isn’t much to it. I ran through an upgrade a short while ago and if you’re interested in the process, here were the steps I followed:

I had previously setup a few FreeBSD systems to act as PPTP servers for places that I had them acting as firewalls using mpd. However, I was constantly running into problems with “No buffer space available” and packets would drop, connections would be sluggish, etc. I was just doing some system upgrades and decided to look at other options. I found a port called poptop “the pptp server for linux” in the ports distribution, and even a howto online detailing what my configs should look like. So I gave it a shot:

To test it out I installed FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE AMD64. Install completed flawlessly, so it was time to do some compiling. A vanilla make buildworld: 48 minutes Not bad.. but not amazing either. So I decided to do some threaded compiles to stress the system a little bit. Since it’s an 8 core system, I used the following:

time -h make -j8 buildworld

The resulting time of: 12m 33s was nothing short of impressive. Following up with a:

Gentoo 2007.0 has been out for some time, but I just now got a chance to setup a few new Gentoo systems. Previously I’ve always installed via the 2006.1 installation media, either the LiveCD or LiveDVD, and used the GTK installer. While the 2006.1 GTK installer was certainly buggy, I was able to get a process worked out that allowed the system to be loaded fairly consistently each time. However, it was *much* more difficult with the 2007.0 LiveCD and DVD. Here are some of the trials that I ended up going through..

While looking for an easy way to keep my Slackware install up to date, I just ran across this article:http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/1337224 Now that Slackware 11.0 is out, you may wonder what is the best way to update the distribution. Swaret is an open source project that aims to keep various versions of Slackware up-to-date. I use Swaret and some cron scripts to keep my servers current automatically.